Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [4]
Beginning after the end of the restrictive Production Code in 1968 and before special effects took hold of the genre in the early 1980s, these scary movies benefited from coming of age when there was increased artistic freedom but enough technical limitations to keep control in the hands of the director. Their energy focused not on effects, but on the best way to scare an audience. On that question, they shared many ideas. Their intellectual influences were much more diverse than those of future generations of horror makers. This broadened their visions. While most of the directors did not socialize with one another—this was before horror conventions and film festivals became popular—they kept close track of what the others were doing, borrowing good ideas and generally working in a kind of long-distance collaboration. As a result, a direct line can be drawn from Rosemary’s Baby to The Exorcist, from The Last House on the Left to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and from Night of the Living Dead to every horror movie since.
The key horror movie artists of this era had very different sensibilities but remarkably similar personality types: outsiders, insecure and alienated, frequently at odds with their parents and other authority figures. The men (and they are exclusively men) are a surprisingly mildmannered group. They generally dress in rumpled clothes, have broad senses of humor, and rarely seem on the verge of knocking you over the head with a blunt instrument. It’s hard to imagine a less threatening group of people. “The truth is that we are sweet,” confesses George Romero, who has probably dreamed up more ways for a zombie to eat a human being than any man alive. “A bunch of us back then were stoners, but that’s about it. No capes or fangs or anything. Steve King says we don’t have nightmares because we give them all away.”
Most of the artists who make horror movies got started because of an interest in and, often, a joy in being scared when they were kids. The scares of childhood are generally much more varied and intense than those we experience as adults. These directors recall them most vividly. They hold tightly to them. Many grew up in remote parts of the world and with a set of common assumptions about what things went bump in the night; they dipped into the same small pool of menacing literature, theater, and film. As a consequence, the movies during this period not only addressed the same questions, but their answers had enough in common with each other that a cohesive form of the genre developed by the end of the 1970s, when Ron Rosenbaum described this school of scary movies in Harper’s Magazine. He called it the “New Horror.” Horror, he argued, “seems ready to supplant sex and violence in the hierarchy of mass sensation-seeking.”
The popular narrative about the rise of the mainstream studio directors of the New Hollywood is that through the strength of their ideas they defied the bottom line to make something personal. The success of New Horror also depends on the personal visions of a few artists, but the best films were not merely victories by art in its endless battle against commerce. The best horror movies were products of compromise and dispute, stitching together spare parts and tweaking old, fraying conventions. The making of these movies has usually been seen through the narrow prism of one director. That ignores the essentially collaborative way most of these movies were made. After hundreds of conversations with the leading directors, writers, producers,